Songs of Experience

Years in the making, U2’s 14th studio album finds the band straining to reassert its relevance in a world where rock music has long since ceded its vanguard status.

In the late 1980s, en route to Memphis on the mission that would be dubiously immortalized by the documentary U2: Rattle and Hum, Bono hitched a ride with a stranger whose car stereo dashed his spirits. The young driver had been listening to Def Leppard’s Mutt Lange-produced glam-metal opus Hysteria—and it sounded magnificent. Bono was awed. When at last it dawned on the driver who exactly he’d picked up, he switched out the Def Leppard tape for some vintage U2. By comparison, it couldn’t help but sound dull. “I think we were a little out of touch,” Bono reflected later, having heard what U2 lacked. “We weren’t as great as we figured we were.”

It is hard to believe that U2 were galvanized to write Achtung Baby! by a chance encounter with “Pour Some Sugar on Me” on cassette. But then that’s U2: Their art is fundamentally, inveterately emulous. The pursuit of relevance seems above all what motivates them to create. What are they doing, really, when time and again they endeavor to reinvent themselves, if not trying to remain fashionable—or, more precisely, to stave off obsolescence? In 1989, drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. told Bono he worried the band was “turning into the world’s most expensive jukebox.” The band could not abide it. “They became so bored playing U2’s greatest hits that one night they went out and played the whole set backward,” Bill Flanagan writes in his biography U2 at the End of the World. “It didn’t seem to make any difference.” It’s this inclination toward boredom and restlessness that has always secretly been U2’s animating force.

The fear of seeming “a little out of touch”: Nearly 30 years after Bono declared on stage that the band had to “go away and dream it all up again,” this is still the prime creative catalyst. And on Songs of Experience, U2’s 14th studio album, the anxiety is more apparent than ever. Bono, it seems, has been spending a lot of time around a lot of strangers’ car stereos, and what he’s concluded U2 lacks he’s undertaken resolutely to embrace. Behold the album’s many hallmarks of the modern: There are contributions by Kendrick Lamar (“American Soul”) and Haim (“Lights of Home”), and there are flourishes that conspicuously recall the xx (“Red Flag Day”) and Arcade Fire (“Get Out of Your Own Way”). Opening track “Love Is All We Have Left” invokes a distinctly Justin Vernon-ish vocoder, an homage we might dub “Bono Iver.” And “Summer of Love”—on which Bono croons “I been thinkin’ ‘bout the West Coast/Not the one that everyone knows”—suggests someone just discovered Born to Die.

Bono and the Edge have said that lately, innovation has been less evident in rock music than elsewhere—in “R&B, hip-hop, and pop,” according to a profile of the band in the New York Times. This academic interest in other genres is manifest across Songs of Experience. It’s clear in the subwoofer-trashing bass that undergirds “The Blackout,” the liveliest Adam Clayton has sounded in ages. It’s clear in the thick slabs of lurid distortion that course through “American Soul,” which last appeared, in much different form, as “XXX” on Kendrick’s DAMN. And it’s clear in the sumptuous, waterlogged beat that concludes the final track, “13 (There Is a Light),” reminiscent of Noah “40” Shebib and his legions of imitators. These are brazen attempts to capture the zeitgeist, even by U2’s standards. Their combined effect is dire: Songs of Experience is the shameless effort of four men in their late 50s to muster a contemporary, youthful sound.

Of course, the band’s aspirations toward relevance are tempered by a competing pursuit: Here they strive, as usual, to guarantee longevity. They want to seem in touch; they also want to canonize another classic. This, one presumes, accounts for the inclusion of more familiar-sounding U2 barn-burners such as “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in its Way,” which sounds almost exactly like one expects a U2 song with that title would, and lead single “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” which has already failed to take hold of the popular imagination.

“The problem with rock now is that it’s trying to be cool,” Bono said recently. “But clear thoughts and big melodies—if they come from a true place, they not only capture the instant, they become eternal in a way.” The Edge, meanwhile, said the band was concerned with whether these songs would “be played by people in a bar in 25 years.” Well, Songs of Experience does not much “capture the instant,” hunger to as it might, and it is safe to assume that while, say, “Pride (In the Name of Love)” or “New Year’s Day” have proven something like timeless, “Red Flag Day” and “The Showman (Little More Better)” will fall rather short of eternal. “How long must we sing this song?” Bono asked on “Sunday Bloody Sunday”—and they’ve been obliged to sing it nightly since 1983. With these songs, about a single tour should do.

Despite the blatant bid to sound modish and rejuvenated, U2 cannot help in certain respects but sound the same. Bono still writes Bono-brand howlers: He still lapses into prosaic platitudes (“Are you tough enough to be kind?/Do you know your heart has its own mind?”), moony cliche (“Free yourself to be yourself/If only you could see yourself”), and arena-rock patois (“You! Are! Rock’n’roll!”—the “you” there is America, naturally). Politics are addressed in earnest, to ludicrously ill-judged effect. Which is more vicariously embarrassing: the stretch of “Red Flag Day” that contrasts a tryst on the beaches of the Mediterranean with the deaths of Syrian refugees (“Baby let’s get in the water… so many lost in the sea last night”), or the portmanteau punchline that ends “American Soul,” which is simply: “refujesus”?

It is tempting to praise Songs of Experience on the basis of its mawkish wholeheartedness. It does indeed seem like the product of considerable toil: This thing has been in progress for something like three years now, and between its revisions, reconstructions, and post-election rewritings, it plainly benefits from more attention and effort than any U2 album since All That You Can’t Leave Behind. But it’s precisely this manifest ambition that makes Songs of Experience dispiriting. The music itself isn’t any better merely because this time around the band actually cares; all the industrious fervor amounts to meager flailing. It’s one thing to fail when you’re phoning it in: You leave hope that you could pull it off if only you tried. It’s quite another to fail when you’re giving it everything.